If they ever created a “Thelma and Louise” award for most spectacular launch into the political abyss, Gov. Eric Greitens and President Donald Trump would surely be the hands-down winners.
They are both first-time politicians who astounded their more experienced opponents and won election to office in 2016. Both claimed a nonexistent popular mandate to destroy and rebuild their respective governance systems. And less than a year into their terms, both have spectacularly self-destructed.
Greitens is now fighting for his political life because of a 2015 sex scandal. Republicans in the Legislature have abandoned him, and he’s now the subject of an investigation by the St. Louis circuit attorney.
Because of comments Trump made last week, countries around the world are now contacting their respective U.S. embassies to ask whether they qualify for the president’s designation of “shithole.”
Trump’s latest gaffe — assuming he doesn’t commit another before this editorial goes to press — follows remarks he reportedly made last month expressing his belief that Haitians “all have AIDS” and worrying that Nigerian immigrants in this country might never “go back to their huts.”
Trump has faced racist accusations since, as a private citizen in 1989, he campaigned for the death penalty for the so-called Central Park Five — black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were accused of raping a white woman in Central Park. Though they were wrongfully convicted and later absolved, Trump insisted as recently as the 2016 presidential campaign that he was right and everyone else was wrong.
He has aligned himself with white supremacists. His racially insensitive tweets and verbal taunts are legendary. As much as congressional Republicans may try to support his agenda, Trump undermines them at every turn.
Likewise, Greitens has squandered the overwhelming Republican majority he enjoys in both houses of the Legislature, largely by repeatedly insulting his colleagues as corrupt, lazy and ineffective to burnish his own public image. He berates them for lax accountability while keeping his own activities secret and refusing to account for his own campaign-related finances.
It didn’t have to be this way. Neophyte politicians have succeed in the past. President Dwight D. Eisenhower won election in 1952 without elective experience. He boldly challenged what he called the “military-industrial complex.” He succeeded where Trump and Greitens have failed largely because he respected America’s time-honored democratic institutions and worked within the system rather than pursuing a wrecking-ball approach.
Both Trump and Greitens are fighters who keep getting up, even when they’ve been delivered knockout punches. But the prospects of either leader surviving to the end of his term look increasingly grim, largely because, like Thelma and Louise in the 1991 movie, neither will take his foot off the accelerator while hurtling toward the cliff ahead.